Exploring Economics of Intimacy Tourism In the Caribbean

Under green and blue strobe lights, the dusty dance floor quickly fills with fifteen couples as a popular bachata song by Romeo Santos queues up. It is a weeknight at La Bodega, an open-air night club in the heart of Las Terrenas, a resort town on the northeastern coast of the Dominican Republic. To the untrained eye, the energy on this dance floor would appear to be nothing more than an organic gathering, one of the few places in the small Dominican seaside town where tourists and Dominicans can be found in equal numbers. But everything is not as it seems: nearly all the Dominican women here are sex workers.